DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — You may notice that things just changed here a bit. Nothing too drastic up front, but there's a whole different set of code running the site on the back end. My strategy is typically to put something live as soon as I think it's ready and squash the bugs as they come up, so if anything seems funky don't be afraid to send an email to e@blogdowntown.com and let me know.

A bit more after the jump...

Up until this point blogdowntown has run on eThreads, a piece of software I first started writing to run forums back in 1998 or so. It had evolved over the years and I still really like it as a software idea, but it wasn't the easiest platform to develop new features onto.

A little over two months ago I started a project to write blogdowntown as a new set of code, using Ruby on Rails as my platform. Just in the past two weeks, though, did I really dig in and decide to get the thing finished and launched.

What you're seeing right now is the result of that work. Hopefully most everything should work the same, and where changes have been made I hope they're improvements.

Searching was a major feature need on the site, and the code now sports that functionality. There are still some tweaks that need to be made, but it's a good start.

Again, email me with issues but I'd hope this'll be a reasonably smooth transition.

Update (8:55pm): Noticed that I hadn't correctly enabled my checks to stop comment spam. In the two hours it was off there were ten or so spam posted. I shudder to think of the old days where we'd get maybe a hundred a day.